The Road to Emmaus: Poems

By Spencer Reece

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A moving, subtle sequence of narrative poems, from a sharp new poetic voice

Two strangers walk toward Emmaus. Christ has just been crucified, and they are heartbroken—until a third man joins them on the road and comforts them. Once they reach Emmaus and break bread, the pair realizes they have been walking with Christ himself. But in the moment they recognize him, he disappears. Spencer Reece draws on this tender story in his mesmerizing collection—one that fearlessly confronts love and its loss, despair and its consolation, and faith in all of its various guises.

Reece's central figure in The Road to Emmaus is a middle-aged man who becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church; these poems follow him to New York City, to Honduras, to a hospital where he works as a chaplain, to a prison, to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. With language of simple, lyrical beauty that gradually accrues weight and momentum, Reece spins compelling dramas out of small moments: the speaker, living among a group of orphans, wondering "Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?"; two men finding each other at a Coming Out Group; a man trying to become visible after a life that had depended on not being seen.

A yearning for connection, an ache of loneliness, and the instant of love disappearing before our eyes haunt this long-awaited second collection from Spencer Reece.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780374713348

Spencer Reece

Spencer Reece's first book of poetry, The Clerk´s Tale (2012), was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the Bakeless Prize and recognized with an award from the Library of Congress. His second collection, The Road to Emmaus (2014), was long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed for the Griffin Prize. Reece has also edited a bilingual anthology of poems by the abandoned girls of Our Little Roses, Counting Time Like People Count Stars (2017), written a memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark (2021), and published a book of watercolors, All The Beauty Still Left (2021). An Episcopal priest, he served in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Madrid, Spain; New York City, New York. He is the vicar of St. Paul’s, Wickford, Rhode Island.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

ICU

The Manhattan Project

Monaco

The Fifth Commandment

Gilgamesh

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

Margaret

1 Corinthians 13

The Road to Emmaus

The Prodigal Son

Hartford

12:20 in New York

A Few Tender Minutes

Among Schoolchildren

The Poor

My Great-Grandmother’s Bible

The Upper Room

Hymn

Acknowledgments

Also by Spencer Reece

Copyright

I dedicate this book to:

my father, Dr. Richard Lee Reece

my mother, Loretta Witkins Reece

my brother, Carter Straight Reece

&

Bishop Leo Frade & Dr. Diana Frade

—all my love,

all my gratitude to two families

who believed in me

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change.

—ISAK DINESEN, THE MONKEY

ICU

Those mornings I traveled north on I-91,

passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock

where elms discussed their genealogies.

I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,

took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,

learned I was an I drawn to Es.

In small group I said, "I do not like it,

the way young black men die in the ER,

shot, unrecognized, their gurneys stripped,

their belongings catalogued and unclaimed."

In the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed,

blue, spider-delicate in nests of tubes.

A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,

their eyelids the film on old water in a well,

their faces resigned in plastic attics,

their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.

It is correct to love even at the wrong time.

On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one

like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:

I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

First, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote his paper on dwarf stars—What happens to a massive star that burns out? he asked. His calculations suggested that instead of collapsing it would contract indefinitely, under the force of its own gravity. The bright star would disappear but it would still be there; where there had been brilliance there would be a blank. Soon after, workers built Oak Ridge, the accumulation of Cemesto hutments not placed on any map. They built a church, a school, a bowling alley. From all over, families drove through the muddy ruts. The ground swelled about the ruts like flesh stitched by sutures. My father, a child, watched the loads on the tops of their cars tip. Gates let everyone in and out with a pass. Forbidden to tell anyone they were there, my father’s family moved in, quietly, behind the chain-link fence. Niels Bohr said: This bomb might be our great hope. My father watched his parents eat breakfast: his father opened his newspaper across the plate of bacon and eggs, his mother smoked Camel Straights, the ash from her cigarette cometing across the back of the obituaries. They spoke little. Increasingly the mother drank Wild Turkey with her women friends from the bowling league. Generators from the Y-12 plant droned their ambition. There were no birds. General Leslie Groves marched the boardwalks, yelled, his boots pressed the slates and the mud bubbled up like viscera. My father watched his father enter the plant. My shy father went to the library, which was a trailer with a circus tent painted on the side. There he read the definition of uranium, which was worn to a blur. My father read one Hardy Boys mystery after another. It was August 1945. The librarian smiled sympathetically at the twelve-year-old boy. Time to go home, the librarian said. They named the bomb Little Boy. It weighed 9,700 pounds. It was the size of a go-kart. On the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, This is the greatest thing in history. That evening, my father’s parents mentioned Japanese cities. Everyone was quiet. It was the quiet of the exhausted and the innocent. The quietness inside my father was building and would come to define him. I was wrong to judge it. Speak, Father, and I will listen. And if you do